Kim out of strikes as world sits tight

North Korea has outdone itself with its whacko rhetoric in recent days - it's even found a way to make women's clothing sound evil - but it's reached such a frenzy that we have to wonder whether it portends something truly serious.

For decades, North Korea has routinely threatened to destroy the capital of its capitalist neighbour, South Korea, in ''a sea of fire''. Seoul is still standing, a thriving metropolis and a daily rebuke to the poverty of Pyongyang's closed socialist system.

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It warned: ''They should clearly know that in the era of Marshal Kim Jong-un,'' the country's 30-year-old ruler who was promoted by his father from civilian to four-star general at one stroke, ''the greatest-ever commander, all things are different from what they used to be in the past.

''The hostile forces will clearly realise the iron will, matchless grit and extraordinary mettle of the brilliant commander of Mount Paektu'', the legendary birthplace of the Korean people.

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Giving some weight to its words, North Korea has cut off military and humanitarian hotlines that linked the North and South in the absence of diplomatic relations.

This produces guffaws but the rising tensions are also producing some gulps. Remember that North Korea has the world's fifth biggest standing army of about 1.1 million soldiers. (For scale, Australia has a population similar to North Korea's 24 million but has fewer than 60,000 military personnel.) And if you include North Korea's reserve forces, it has the biggest army in the world with 9.5 million troops.

There are serious doubts about how effective Kim's massive army would be in a war - tourists have photographed soldiers on duty in Pyongyang carrying wooden replica guns. But it has a massed artillery capable of bombarding Seoul with half a million shells in an hour.

North Korean army officers punch the air as they chant slogans during a rally. Photo: AP

And, of course, it now has the nuclear bomb. Analysts in Seoul and the US estimate it has half a dozen to a dozen of them.

So the big question is, what is going on? What is Kim Jong-un's plan? Here we enter the realm of theory. Analysts of Kim's super-secretive kingdom have come up with three plausible explanations.

One is that North Korea's long-running protection racket is not working any more, and it is increasing its threats to see if it can restore the old game.

The protection racket? For decades, Pyongyang would threaten to do horrible things to its neighbours, and the West, led by the US, would agree to give the country assistance in return for peace.

But every time, Pyongyang took the aid, reneged on its promises and renewed the threats - and continued to work towards the nuclear bomb it now possesses. That racket is not working any longer.

''The United States will not play the game of accepting empty promises or yielding to threats,'' said US national security adviser Tom Donilon.

''To get the assistance it desperately needs and the respect it claims it wants, North Korea will have to change course. Otherwise, the United States will continue to work with allies and partners to tighten national and international sanctions.''

The theory is that Kim jnr is pushing the threats to new heights to see if he can ultimately force a return to winning aid by extortion.

A second theory is that the boy marshal is simply having trouble consolidating power, and is seeking to win over top military commanders with his bellicosity.

A third is that Kim Jong-un, who convened the annual meeting of the ruling Communist Party on Monday, is hatching a program of economic reform. He spent years at boarding school in Switzerland and knows first-hand that there is an alternative to the ''juche'' policy of hermetically sealed socialist self-reliance that has forced an estimated two-thirds of his people to live on a subsistence diet.

But to make such a dramatic policy change, Kim needs to strengthen his hand. The theory runs that he is doing so by putting the country on a heightened state of military alert.

If any of the theories is accurate, there is a high chance that Kim will proceed to an act of military aggression - bombard a South Korean base, sink a South Korean ship, or shoot South Korean soldiers across the DMZ, all of which Pyongyang has done in the recent past. But not proceed beyond, to the point of opening an all-out war.

But all of those theories assume the regime, ultimately, is rational. There is no such guarantee.

Seoul and Washington are remaining calm. There is no satellite evidence of North Korean mobilisation. The US has already decided that, if it sees the fuelling of any long-range North Korean missiles, it will strike them pre-emptively. And Park is calmly proceeding with her policy of ''trust-building'' by giving food aid to the North. How's that for a sinister swish?